The Trans Day of Remembrance and the Indigenous Day of Mourning share a deep link, and not just because they’re occurring in the same week this year. In the pursuit of land, settler colonialism and white dominant Christianity rob us of various expressions of sex, gender, and family relationships, all of which are essential to joy and connection. How is queerness connected to #LandBack and #Decolonization movements? And how can we move past the violence?
ID: a photo of a plaque on a boulder. Text reads. "National Day of Mourning. Since 1970, Native Americans have gathered at noon on Cole's Hill in Plymouth to commemorate a National Day of Mourning on the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. Many Native Americans do not celebrate the arrival of the pilgrims and other European settlers. To them, Thanksgiving day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of their people, the theft of their lands, and the relentless assault on their culture. Participants in National Day of Mourning honor Native ancestors and the struggles of Native peoples to survive today. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression which Native Americans continue to experience. Erected by the town of Plymouth on behalf of the United American Indians of New England.
ID: a black graphic for the Transgender Day of Remembrance, portraying illustrations of 3 candles in the trans flag colors of blue and pink. Shared from an article by Dr. Catherine Grace Bielick that is worth a read.
Trans Day of Remembrance (TDOR) was on Monday, and the Indigenous Day of Mourning (called Thanksgiving by settler history) is upon us. Before now, I never thought too much about these holidays in relationship to each other. But it turns out, the violence of transphobia and settler colonialism are inextricably linked, not in a general “it’s all connected” way, but in very specific policies and histories. If your intention for today is to educate yourself better about the ways settler colonialism in order to dismantle it, then let’s do it together.
I recently came across a 2019 TEDx Talk by Ried Gustafson, a native Kawaik (Laguna Pueblo) scholar. Gustafson is a super smarty who packs a lot of dense concepts and words into a 12-minute talk: if you’re up for that right now, go listen before you read this. If that sounds daunting, read this first as a pre-listening warm up and watch his talk later. Just make sure you watch it.
Relying on the work of other Indigenous scholars and wisdom figures, Gustafson says that the U.S. laws that made it legal to steal land from the First Nations did not only steal land. They also destroyed relational and kinship structures.
How Do You Steal Kinship and Queerness?
The Dawes Act of 1887 is most famous as part of a series of acts that allowed settlers to claim Native land. But the Dawes Act was a process.
First it gave the President powers to survey Indigenous land, which was held in common, and divide it into private plots. Then each plot was registered under the name of the Native man, and he was named both head of household and a U.S. citizen. This gave him a legal position above the women of his family network.
In fact, in order to keep the most land, families had to reorganize themselves into “one man, one woman” households, a forced assimilation into white settler hetero family structures … and yet the law only gave them back a small amount of their own land for doing so. After this process the “surplus land” was made available to settlers and homesteaders.
Next came the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which on the surface looked like an effort reverse the effects of cultural assimilation by setting up dedicated tribal councils to govern land, mineral, and water rights, as well as to revive Native historic cultures. But the truth goes deeper.
Gustafson reports that the law governing these tribal councils imposed a Western-style system, with only men allowed to be in positions of power on the councils. The men were to represent their sectors, rather than each person speaking for themselves. This was vastly different than before, when more consensual power had been spread among different genders and all people.
(Sidenote: In fact, worldwide, some Indigenous understandings of family and sex may not have included “gender” at all, and certainly not as we understand it now. Read more in The Invention Of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses by Dr. Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí. Not up for an entire book? There’s a short and powerful book report here.* [see note] )
One last example. In 1956, the Indian Relocation Act pressured Natives to move off of reservation lands and into urban areas, providing funding and “vocational training,” for jobs. Gustafson points out that this removed people from kinship structures, which had largely still survived on reservation land.
Why is that important? Kinship structures were more varied and communal - even “queer” by Western standards. But once moved into the cities, First Nations people were forced into hetero, nuclear, isolated family living situations. The Relocation Act also moved Indigenous folks into a gendered workforce which mostly identified men as breadwinners and women were in charge of child-raising, a stark and isolating difference from the way labor was shared before.
What Does It Mean?
Maybe these changes to gender relationships don’t sound like a lot. Maybe they don’t sound as devastating as losing land and the relationship to land. But what if it’s all related?
Enacted in all of these federal acts of legislation is the self-serving white dominant cultural belief that the Indigenous family structures were “deviant” and wrong. As Gustafson says, “If Native people were unable to govern themselves in the most intimate ways, then they were unable to govern themselves at all.” This justified settler colonialism and land theft.
There’s more. Flattening these complex sexual and family structures into “one man, one woman” households - heteronormative monogamy - models a hoarding framework, says Gustafson. This model shows that relationships and people are to be hoarded, not shared or respected. The man “owns” the woman, or, in more recent variations, the two partners “own” each other. (Many LGBTQ relationships can fall into this pattern as well.)
We can see this in “family comes first” and “us against the world” attitudes that pit one household against the greater community, all of which can drastically harm communal life. Gustafson says relationship hoarding can translate into resource hoarding, as it becomes an all-encompassing mindset that views others only in terms of what they provide and “owe” to us.
The legacy of settler colonialism, property ownership, capitalism, and white Christian dominance has been to rob all of us of the joy and diversity that more varied, communal relationships can offer. It continually causes the death of trans folks - the reason for the Trans Day of Remembrance - by asserting heteronormative cisgender patriarchy as the only way to be, putting to death the myriad ways that human relationship, expression, gender, and sexuality can be.
Extended families, chosen families, communal living, polyamorous relationships, queer relationships, affinity groups and households: all of these offer possibilities for communal, relational joy and growth, and for each person within to become more fully who they are: both more liberation and more connected and supported.
When we let this sink in, we can feel the grief of loss and what could have been. It’s really painful.
But it also opens up what could be.
What Can We Do?
Dr. Kim Tallbear shares 4 guiding principles as we decolonize beyond settler family practices, finding our way to a framework that would allow us to stop hoarding, not only relationships, but resources and land.
Center relationality (not ownership, owing, or entitlement) in our relationships and ways of being.
Ensure that we are sharing our power reciprocally. Talk about who has what power and how it’s coming up in conversations, decision-making, and more.
Allow our intimacies to heal ourselves and each other, rather than hurting.
Slow down and decipher what pain may be coming up when you are showing your vulnerable side.
What would feel more healing?
What might need to change for healing to happen?
Make sure that our relationships work to build and maintain strong community and communal life.
Where Do We Go From Here?
On a personal note, as a queer and trans person these insights break my heart: I have bought into so much of this heteropatriarchal bullshit over time, and my partner, friends, children and I have all had to slowly unpack it and unlearn it. This has been the work for so many, especially those in BIPOC queer and trans communities, who have also led the resistance to this same bullshit, generation after generation. We must always learn from and center them.
It’s important to listen to the 12 minute TEDx Talk and to delve into the supporting scholarship. But it feels like the next step is to radically reimagine how this plays out in our own lives and community. What changes does it invite?
There’s a balance between expanding our own relationships and centering BIPOC and Native folks who are still being attacked and erased by a settler colonialism that we participate in. How do we expand this understanding to #LandBack and a more joyful relational life? I feel that my clients and I are often touching the surface of this question in our sessions, and I look forward to digging in deeper.
* On the book report: Though I don’t necessarily recommend the content creator, the book report is the only mildly accessible summary of the book I can find at this point. It does not provide image descriptions, but the language is clear and non-scholarly, and it’s not hidden behind an academic paywall.
Further Resources:
Evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, with help from Friedrich Engels and others, breaks down how the invention of property ownership starts to necessitate the control of women's sexuality: because a male who owns property wants to pass it down to his children and only his children. Some articles include: Raising Darwin's Consciousness
Feminist historian Silvia Federici's Caliban and The Witch is a look at how the ruling class in medieval and early Renaissance Europe created capital and capitalism. She documents how the peasant class was finding cracks in the feudal system in order to organize and gain freedoms and power in the Middle Ages. In order to violently install capitalism, reproductive labor (not just having children but doing all the work required to help laborers survive, like cooking, preserving, cleaning, and caretaking) had to be feminized and then controlled by the ruling class, the religious leadership, and the wealthy mercantile class. Witch hunts were just one method of doing this. Other kinds of living and labor had to be racialized (via chattel slavery) or erased (Indigenous folks on Turtle Island, Africa, and elsewhere) in order to steal the land and acquire initial capital that would lead to wealth. Gender control is very important in this process.
The Book on Fire Podcast devotes Season 2 to Caliban and The Witch and may be an easier and more accessible way into the content.